I love your enthusiasm! But as someone who works in semiconductor development, I feel a bit like it is time to abandon this branch of the technology tree for now again. Maybe I am just disheartened from the PhD stress, but where does it really lead to right now? Following up on Moore's Law right now just seems to promise higher efficiency and lower electricity demands while actually that is mainly greenwashing attempt IMO (lower resolution technologies are more energy and resurce efficient when considering resource demand during production; high device density leads usually to increase of the number of transistors which are operated parallely, so while the single FET is more efficient in dynamic operation, the whole chip might have much higher leakage). At the same time this efficiency is used as justification to just increase the calculation load whithout considering if it is useful (e.g. LLMs). Resources might be better allocated for More than Moore/architectural approaches e.g. for neuromorphic computing to actually reduce the immense AI computing load coming up.

Sorry for the rant, I think I gotta quit my job.

You're right, I try to remind myself to marvel at the incredibly cool science we wield every single day.

But I'm also pained because I understand where the "boring future" folks come from too:

Where would we be if all this incredible technology was actually designed for humanity and not simply for profits at all cost? If optimizing for humanity was the target instead of exploiting it?

Smartphones, for instance. Small, networked computers! In your pocket! Wow! I've always wanted a pocket laptop! But they sure don't feel like it. They're designed to be content (mainly ad) delivery devices and data miners first, and useful machines second.

(There are some tiny niche actual-computer palmtops now which are pretty cool.)

I think that's the part that gets people kinda depressive about modern science breakthroughs. The coolest stuff, the working folk don't even get to tangibly feel much benefit from.

Discovery is locked behind paywall research journals and implementation is marketed in the interests of capital and used against us to make us work harder for longer hours for less pay.

What's happening to space is a VERY stark illustration of all this. NASA unifying humanity and working globally on projects like the ISS was INSPIRING.

Now it's all about privatized interests and their stupid desires, like space hotels for the elite.

I bet we'd marvel at technology designed for human beings, and not sheer exploitation.

But the fact we all got this ultra powerful computer, with a high resolution high framerate self emitting screen, no active cooling, a bunch of sensors, lots of memory and storage and hyper connected to all sorts of networks, all powered by a high capacity high power low wear battery should be mind blowing.

I think it is still mindblowing in the gaming/simulation realm.

This is something that gets a lot of human passion poured in and (to an extent) gets hardware utilized quite efficiently. It's also a miracle for number-crunching researchers, or those who's only hope of investigating something is simulation, heh.

But yeah, it feels like other aspects got drowned in eshittification. My phone would be able to host the whole old internet, pretty much! There should be so much collaboration, but manpower is instead poured into reinventing corporate infrastructure like 100,000 times over?